I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University and Lyon.

So it's fair to say that I grew up with the shuttle over these past 30 years and it's going to be strange not having it around any more. Despite the fact that it may never have been the perfect launch vehicle (I still recall early discussions around HOTOL, for instance), I think it did it's job well. I know I'll miss it.